[nos-bbs] Early note on RedHat FC-5

[Barry Siegfried]

["George (Skip) VerDuin" <k8rra at ameritech.net> wrote]:

> On another thread, I did a minor agony over the NOS on Windows note -
> I misspoke.
>
> It was certainly because I had not researched the issue carefully due
> to my personal prejudges.
>
> Microsoft has integrated backward compatibility at some level in all
> their Windows offerings.  In the W-95 / W-98 days, I and a lot of my
> peers had really bad experiences with DOS on WIN so eons ago I made
> up my mind that if software was not released for the environment it
> was run in it did not get much attention from me.  That opinion has
> survived / until now...
>
> I'm delighted to hear nos is well enough behaved, and perhaps XP
> is mature enough, that nos will run on top of Win.  OK, so a couple
> special things are added, so there are a few shortcomings, and Jay
> pokes fun, but at least it seems like a good beginners test bed.
> Thanks to this reflector and it's participants.

I would like to clarify one or two things about running a DOS-NOS
on a Windows NTVDM platform using SwsvPkt.  Yes it works and works
rather well.  However, I would NOT use this arrangement except perhaps
as a way to provide some added flexibility if there is a Windows
machine you happen to sit at and need to use NOS program on it as
a user.  I certainly wouldn't use this sort of arrangement for any
kind of critical or remote installation of NOS where you need packet
switching gateway management and/or reliability.  The NIC hardware
sharing between NOS and its Windows host O/S obviously does leave a
bit to be desired.

It *is* interesting that DOS on early Windows was as bad as it was.
I never quite understood why this should be.  Of course, being the
pure DOS elitist that I am, it took me until the late 1990s to
actually start using a Windows machine and that was only because I
was forced to do it in my professional life.

Believe it or not, back in those days, the GUI platform that was the
absolute friendliest to DOS applications was OS/2.  OS/2 was a far
superior product to early iterations of Windows and to this day, I
STILL use an OS/2 Warp machine at home and run two separate instances
of NOS on it, each in their own VDMs and each of which have their own
associated NIC hardware.  This platform is so stable that it can easily
be used as a machine on which you can run multiple DOS-NOS gateways,
particularly if you manage a lot of IP address space and need to divide
it up and distribute services between gateway machines.

For a while in the late 1990s, it looked like OS/2 might give the new
generation of Microsoft Windows a run for its money (it certainly was
superior to Windows 3.3, but then again, looking back, Windows 3.3
was an absolutely wretched product).  But alas, Microsoft had nearly
unlimited marketing resources for PC O/S platforms and they simply
outmanevered IBM in this regard once the "next generation" of Windows
platforms was released, starting with Windows 95.  IBM also didn't put
its own very best marketing effort into OS/2.  Consequently, OS/2 is
no longer manufactured and won't be supported anymore after December
of 2006.  But as long as I can still install it on a machine, I will
continue to use it because of its friendliness toward using discreet
and multiple sessions of DOS that can each manage its own set of
hardware.

73, de Barry, K2MF >>
           o
          <|>      Barry Siegfried
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